Director Uberto Pasolini presents his movie on loneliness in Madrid

His surname is Pasolini and he is a grandnephew, on his mother’s side, of late Italian film director Luchino Visconti. Uberto Pasolini (1957) was aiming to become and economist, but it is difficult to escape the influence of cinema with such a legacy.

The Visconti family has always given priority to the freedom of “exploring what you want to discover”, Pasolini told Efe in an interview in Madrid.

The director, who produced Full Monty, is in Spain to present his latest movie, Still Life, which won an award at the Venice festival in 2013.

Still Life centers on the story of John May (Eddie Marsan), a disciplined and painstaking London public servant who lives alone on apples and tuna fish cans and whose job is to find the relatives of people who have died in loneliness.

“I spent six or seven months with those public servants in London and there are many scenes copied from reality. They are like policemen: they enter the homes of people who died lonely and search for clues, such as a photograph or a will”, Pasolini explains.

In most cases they do not find anything, and in 30 percent of the cases when they do, the relatives show no interest whatsoever, says Pasolini.

There are thousands of funerals without a soul attending, he adds of his movie, which reflects on life, death and relationships with others.

What began as a social investigation became a very personal matter for the director. “Years ago I divorced and for the first time in 25 years I returned to an empty home. For the first time I felt lonely”, he explains.

The movie starts when John May, who is about to lose his job, finds out that his last case is his frontdoor neighbor, whom he never got to know when he was alive.

“Before making the film I myself did not know my neighbors. I live in a London street with a neighbor on each side. I thought this could not continue and I rang their doorbell and presented myself with a bottle of wine. Now I am friends with one of them and I went to funeral of the other”, Pasolini said.

What is most surprising is that John May is not a typical retiring solitary character but a man full of generosity and concern for others, with the peculiarity he expresses his feelings through the dead.

“John May is 50 per cent like me, compulsive and obsessive with small things, with details, and 50 percent what I would like to be, regarding generosity”, the director affirms.

For the lead role Pasolini thought from the start about Eddie Marsan, who had already played secondary characters in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, Steven Spielberg’s War Horse and with Bryan Singer.

“I needed an actor who without doing much or talking could transmit humanity. Eddie is known for more violent and dramatic roles but I knew he had a knack to connect with the public”, Pasolini says.

He admits he is an admirer of Visconti, but especially of his first movies, La Terra Trema, on Sicilian fishermen, or Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli, which is centered on immigration to northern Italy.

“What is interesting about these films is that they depict a world which was not his, situations that had nothing to do with his privileged life”, he adds.

It is the same with him. “I enjoy cinema as an opportunity to discover worlds and situations far from my privileged life”, he concludes.